Artillery Walker

This project is based on the concept art “Artillery Walker” by Taeun Ryu on ArtStation. For me, it's always a pleasure to be able to make a 3D rendition of a great concept art, and “Artillery Walker” was such a big eye-catcher when I was browsing various concept art for hero props. The concept really spoke to my love for mechas, sci-fi machinery, and also reminded me of model kits such as Gundam and Zoids. My goal was to make a full 3D rendition of this big semi-humanoid war machine.

Overall project was done over the course of 6 weeks. First 4 weeks were spent making the model, and last 2 weeks were spent texturing, lookDev, camera animation, and rendering.

Hard surface modeling was definitely the main challenge for this project, as the concept art contains a crazy amount of detail, full of small intricate objects that make up a big complex whole. It definitely pushed my modeling skills in order to keep a semi-organic inspired shape, while keeping the hard-surface smoothness and uniformity to the whole thing. The entire asset was done with Autodesk Maya.

For texturing, I wanted the asset to be a heavy, metallic machine that has seen lots of wear and tear while on the battlefield. Texturing was done with Foundry Mari, where I made diffuse, glossiness, specular, bump maps, as well as various masks for different materials. I also used Substance Painter in order to create masks for damages, dirt, and rust, and Photoshop in order to create the various graphics on the mech.  Above shows beauty render, diffuse, and glossiness map.

Look development was done with VRay in Maya. The main goal for lookDev was to create a variety of different metals, both raw and painted, glossy and rough, to really show the weight of the asset, and how intricately the concept artist combined different materials to create this machine. Main inspiration for the look dev stage was the Jaegers from the Pacific Rim films and various Iron Man armors.

Overall this project really made me focus on the fundamentals of 3D hard surface modeling, texturing, and lookdev. I had lots of fun and am very grateful for the experience.